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Index TermsLoad shifting, micro-CHP, smart meter, temperature-dependent thermal load modeling.
NOMENCLATURE
Constants
Time window showing available
hours of operation for shiftable load
.
The number of
shiftable loads
hours of operation, (
the
number of ).
Variables
Manuscript received November 13, 2012; revised March 11, 2013; accepted
April 27, 2013. Date of publication July 15, 2013; date of current version December 24, 2013.
The authors are with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Tehran, Tehran 11365-4563, Iran (e-mail: m.tasdighi@ut.ac.ir;
h.ghasemi@ut.ac.ir; arkian@ut.ac.ir).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSG.2013.2261829
1949-3053 2013 IEEE
Time step
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I. INTRODUCTION
As mentioned before, electrical demand should also be flexible to be coordinated with thermal demand, allowing to implement DR programs. In a microgrid equipped with smart meters, numerous data would be available which can be processed
for several goals. Reference [15] describes a method of appliances location determination from the multi-hop tree structure
of SMPTs. Reference [11] presents a method of extraction of
users activities from electric power consumption data which
is provided by SMPTs. In this study, the data is provided by
SMPTs showing the energy consumption and operation time of
each electrical appliance in a house. Besides specifying each
appliances share from total electrical demand, appliances are
also categorized into shiftable and nonshiftable loads. Then, an
optimization module decides to employ load shifting in such a
way that electrical demand is coordinated with thermal demand
while considering the main grid time-of-use (TOU) price tariffs. Electrical power storages such as batteries help in implementing DR as well. They can charge during hours in which
the main grid electricity price is low and discharge during peak
price hours helping to reduce microgrid operation cost.
Another challenge in operation of microgrids is to consider
uncertainties [8]. Forecasting thermal and electrical demands
yields uncertainties that should be considered. Furthermore, in
this study, the building outdoor temperature which is also forecasted for the next 24 hours is taken into account in temperature
dependent thermal load modeling. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to identify and rank the impact of several uncertainties.
Basically, the contributions of this study are as follows:
The buildings thermal load is modeled more precisely in
the form of desired hot water and building temperature.
Flexible thermal loads effect on micro-CHP unit operation is investigated by considering acceptable intervals
around the desired temperatures of the building and the
water storage.
Smart meters data is used to segregate total electrical demand profile into shiftable and nonshiftable loads and coordinate micro-CHPs electrical and thermal output power.
It is shown that this would lead to better microgrids participation in implementing DR program.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The temperature-dependent thermal load modeling is presented in
Section II. Then, Section III describes control scenarios for
a micro-CHP. Micro-CHP scheduling formulation, including
objective function and the corresponding constraints are
explained in Section IV. The simulation results along with
sensitivity analysis are illustrated and discussed in Section V.
The conclusions are provided in Section VI.
II. THE TEMPERATURE-DEPENDENT THERMAL LOAD
MODELING
As mentioned before, in this paper, thermal loads of the
building are modeled within the context of desired hot water
temperature and building temperature. In modeling the hot water
storage, as this study is more concerned with energy management concept, the energy equivalent of the hot water storage
at each time step is taken into consideration and the dynamic
of the water flow is not considered. It means that the storage is
assumed to be always full, i.e., if some hot water is drawn from
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the storage, cold water with the same volume enters the storage
and replaces the consumed hot water and this changes the storage
energy level. The water storage is heated through a micro-CHP
unit. The thermal power required to maintain the building
temperature is drawn from the water storage as well.
Accordingly, two processes change the water storage temperature from its desired level: 1) substitution of the exiting hot
water with the entering cold water, and 2) the thermal power
drawn/injected from/to the storage. So, the water storage temperature at each hour is calculated from the following equation:
(1)
In (1), the first term on the right side of the equation refers to
equilibrium temperature of storage water which is the result
of mixing cold water and remaining hot water in the storage.
The second term represents storage water temperature deviation caused by circulating air in the building and thermal power
from the micro-CHP. In this study, the storage is assumed to be
isolated so that its heat loss is negligible.
According to the thermal modeling for a building presented
in [16], the building temperature at each hour is obtained by:
(2)
in which
.
A. Heat-Led Control
Heat-led control is referred to as the most likely standard control strategy for a micro-CHP [6]. This kind of control is aimed
at maintaining water storage and building temperatures at their
desired levels. In this paper, the heat-led control is formulated
based on [9] with little changes focused on water storage temperature rather than its stored thermal energy. Reference [9],
has utilized an auxiliary burner along with the micro-CHP unit
in order to supply thermal loads when micro-CHP unit has not
started up yet, or when the micro-CHP maximum output power
is not enough to supply the thermal loads. Micro-CHP, based on
technologies such as microturbines and reciprocating engines,
can startup quickly (in the order of seconds) compared to conventional cogeneration units [16], [17]; so it can be neglected
compared to one hour scheduling time-step. Furthermore, in this
study, the micro-CHP capacity is great enough to supply the
peak thermal load; so the auxiliary burner is not considered. The
heat-led control process consists of the following steps:
1)
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5) If
for
As it can be seen from (3), it is assumed that the price of purchasing/selling power from/to the grid that is the same for each
hour, and the price of natural gas does not change during a day.
Furthermore, microgrid does not have any limitations in exchanging power with the main grid. Positive values for
represents purchasing power from the main grid at hour , and
negative values for
refers to selling power to the main
grid at hour .
B. Constraints
1) Electrical Demand-Supply Balance: In this study, the microgrids DERs that supply electrical power are: a micro-CHP
unit and a battery. In order to implement load shifting, power
consumption of each appliance, which is provided by the smart
meters, is processed and the appliances are categorized into
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2) Desired Hot Water and Building Temperatures: According to what was mentioned in Section III-B, these constraints are as follows:
(6)
(16)
(7)
(17)
(8)
(18)
(9)
6) Battery Operation: In this study, it is assumed that the battery in the microgrid is the one used in a sedan size PHEV and
there is always at least one PHEV connected to the microgrid
parked in the building. However,
and
are determined according to the capacity of the plug to which the battery
is connected [18].
(10)
(19)
(11)
(12)
(13)
(14)
(15)
7) Shiftable Loads:
Shiftable loads power consumption: In this study, we have
assumed that a forecasting module uses the smart meters
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
The case study is a residential building in Ontario, Canada. A
micro-CHP with
capacity is considered for the building.
The water storage capacity is 150 L. The battery capacity is assumed 6.86 kWh which is the capacity of a plug in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) battery (compact sedan) [18]. Fig. 2 shows
the total electrical demand with segregating it into each appliances share. This is achieved by means of smart meters used in
the building. The buildings hot water demand is shown in Fig. 3
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TABLE III
ASSUMED VALUES FOR PARAMETERS
TABLE II
TOU PRICE TARIFFS
[19]. Five shiftable loads are considered in this building including: washing machine, dryer, dish washer, iron, and vacuum
cleaner. The energy consumption and hours of operation data for
these appliances are shown in Table I. Table II shows the TOU
price tariffs currently used in Ontario, Canada [20]. Pick price
hours are [8 A.M.19 P.M.]. The price of natural gas is considered 18.2
[20]. Table III shows assumed parameters
in solving (3).
A. Microgrid Operation Cases
In this study, 4 cases for microgrid operation are simulated
and compared. Each case is different in terms of using/not using
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day. The uncertain parameters are assumed to have normal distribution with 5% standard deviation (STD) around their mean
values which are forecasted values shown in Figs. 2, 3, and 6.
Fig. 10 shows the probability distribution function (PDF) of
operation cost for the three uncertain parameters: electrical demand, thermal demand, and outdoor temperature. Table V shows
STD values caused by each uncertain parameter. As it can be
seen, uncertainty in electrical demand causes the most STD in
operation cost. Therefore, it is concluded that improving the
electrical demand forecast by means of deploying smart meters
data has the highest impact in terms of decreasing the risk.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper presents an optimal scheduling model for a residential microgrid. In this model, temperature dependent thermal
load modeling is formulated and smart meters data is used to
achieve lower operation cost. It is shown that this kind of thermal
load modeling together with implementing load shifting, based
on smart meters data, can facilitate the micro-CHP smart control leading to more flexibility of microgrids. The scheduling is
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